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The Bonesetter's Daughter_FRAGRANCE-2

谭恩美
『』
hebebl
总共15章（已完结）

The Bonesetter's Daughter 精彩片段：

FRAGRANCE-2

PART THREE

ONE

Mr. Tang was in love with LuLing, though he had never met her. Ruth could sense this. He talked as if he knew her better than anyone else, even her own daughter. He was eighty years old, a survivor of World War Two, the civil war in China, the Cultural Revolution, and a triple coronary bypass. He had been a famous writer in China, but here his work remained untranslated and unknown. A linguistics colleague of Arts had given Ruth his name.

"She is a woman of strong character, very honest," he said to Ruth on the telephone after he began to translate the pages Ruth had mailed to him. "Could you send me her picture, one when she was a young woman? Seeing her would help me say her words in English the way she has expressed them in Chinese."

Ruth thought that was an odd request, but she complied, mailing him scanned copies of the photo of LuLing and GaoLing with their mother when they were young, and another taken when LuLing first arrived in the United States. Later, Mr. Tang asked Ruth for a picture of Precious Auntie. "She was unusual," he remarked. "Self-educated, forthright, quite a rebel for her time." Ruth was bursting to ask him: Did he know whether Precious Auntie was indeed her mothers real mother? But she held off, wanting to read his translation all at one time, not piecemeal. Mr. Tang had said he would need about two months to finish the job. "I dont like to just transliterate word for word. I want to phrase it more naturally, yet ensure these are your mothers words, a record for you and your children for generations to come. They must be just right. Dont you agree?"

While Mr. Tang translated, Ruth lived at LuLings house. She had told Art of her decision when he returned from Hawaii.

"This seems sudden," he said as he watched her pack. "Are you sure youre not being rash? What about hired help?"

Had she downplayed the problems over the past six months? Or had Art simply not been paying attention? She was frustrated by how little they seemed to know each other.

"I think it would be easier if you hired help to take care of you and the girls," Ruth said.

Art sighed.

"Im sorry. Its just that the housekeepers I get for my mother keep quitting, and I cant get Auntie Gal or anyone else to take care of her except for an occasional day here and there. Auntie Gal said that the one week she spent with her was worse than running after her grandkids when they were babies. But at least she finally believes the diagnosis is real and that ginseng tea isnt a cure-all."

"Are you sure something else isnt going on?" he asked, following Ruth into the Cubbyhole.

"What do you mean?" She took down diskettes and notebooks from the shelves.

"Us. You and me. Do we need to talk about something more than just your mothers mind falling apart?"

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作品简介：

At the beginning of Amy Tan's fourth novel, two packets of papers written in Chinese calligraphy fall into the hands of Ruth Young. One bundle is titled Things I Know Are True and the other, Things I Must Not Forget. The author? That would be the protagonist's mother, LuLing, who has been diagnosed with Alzheimer's disease. In these documents the elderly matriarch, born in China in 1916, has set down a record of her birth and family history, determined to keep the facts from vanishing as her mind deteriorates.

A San Francisco career woman who makes her living by ghostwriting self-help books, Ruth has little idea of her mother's past or true identity. What's more, their relationship has tended to be an angry one. Still, Ruth recognizes the onset of LuLing's decline--along with her own remorse over past rancor--and hires a translator to decipher the packets. She also resolves to ask her mother to tell her about her life. For once, she would ask. She would listen. She would sit down and not be in a hurry or have anything else to do.

Framed at either end by Ruth's chapters, the central portion of The Bonesetter's Daughter takes place in China in the remote, mountainous region where anthropologists discovered Peking Man in the 1920s. Here superstition and tradition rule over a succession of tiny villages. And here LuLing grows up under the watchful eye of her hideously scarred nursemaid, Precious Auntie. As she makes clear, it's not an enviable setting:

I noticed the ripe stench of a pig pasture, the pockmarked land dug up by dragon-bone dream-seekers, the holes in the walls, the mud by the wells, the dustiness of the unpaved roads. I saw how all the women we passed, young and old, had the same bland face, sleepy eyes that were mirrors of their sleepy minds.

Nor is rural isolation the worst of it. LuLing's family, a clan of ink makers, believes itself cursed by its connection to a local doctor, who cooks up his potions and remedies from human bones. And indeed, a great deal of bad luck befalls the narrator and her sister GaoLing before they can finally engineer their escape from China. Along the way, familial squabbles erupt around every corner, particularly among mothers, daughters, and sisters. And as she did in her earlier The Joy Luck Club, Amy Tan uses these conflicts to explore the intricate dynamic that exists between first-generation Americans and their immigrant elders. --Victoria Jenkins

作者:谭恩美

标签:TheBonesettersDaughter谭恩美接骨师之女

《The Bonesetter's Daughter》最热门章节：
1、About the Author2、EPILOGUE3、FRAGRANCE-44、FRAGRANCE-35、FRAGRANCE-26、FRAGRANCE-17、CHARACTER8、EFFORTLESS9、DESTINY10、GHOST
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